The beginning of the end of delusion lies in remembrance.
When I began to remember, it felt like my life was coming unraveled. Of course what had begun to unravel was my certainty in the collective delusion — but since my life, like everyone’s life, had been built around this collective delusion, it felt like my life itself was coming apart at the seams. (Had I not become so attached to the delusion, surely this process would have been easier. This is why so many of the brightest human lights have said, “Take nothing with you.”)
When I say that I began to remember, I’m referring to the onset of Gnosis. Some of the ancient Greeks thought of this process as “anamnesis,” literally “the loss of forgetfulness.” Philip K. Dick speaks of Gnosis in terms of “disinhibiting instructions” — and his is perhaps the best definition I’ve ever heard. Through Gnosis — through the action of a kind of “living information” beginning to rewrite the delusional errors we have been immersed in since infancy — we begin “anamnesis”: we begin to remember.
In remembrance, we begin to understand that we are not just the people we thought we were: we’re Something far more, Something not merely human — and it begins to dawn on us that our true origins are not “here.” The fact that this sounds vaguely unhinged punctuates the level of delusion we have been plunged into since infancy, and have therefore always accepted as real.
There are probably as many ways to experience Gnosis as there are ways to experience anything else in the wide-ranging spectrum of human possibilities. There is no one “right” way to experience Gnosis and your experience of this will doubtless be different from mine.
That said, I’d like to share with you what I experience — and right off the bat we’re in unexpected territory. “Gnosis” is a Greek word that means “knowledge,” and most people expect Gnosis to be a simply cerebral experience, a matter having to do with the intellect only. Or a religious experience, something necessarily connected with organized religion. None of this has been my experience at all. In fact, the experience was so overwhelming — in its initial stages especially — that Gnosis actually blinded my intellect, much as an overwhelmingly bright light might temporarily blind someone’s ability to see, and it devastated all of my religious expectations.
And, although I may use religious-sounding metaphors to describe Gnosis (language is a limited faculty), please know that religion is not an essential element of Gnosis — at all.
In my first encounter with Gnosis, I was thunderstruck and struck dumb, as it were, much like Zechariah, the father of St. John the Baptist, in the biblical tale. Now, when I say “struck dumb,” I’m not intending to declare that I lost the ability to speak; no, what I’m trying to communicate is that I suddenly realized that my efforts to articulate what I wanted to say about this were wholly inadequate to the task.
After all, how do you say in words what words can’t say? Such was the early beginning of my experience of Gnosis which, as I’ve found, is far more a dynamic process than any kind of static state.
So blinding was this invisible light from within that I knew — with every cell in my body — that all the millions of words written over all the centuries attempting to encapsulate Truth were mere signposts (and some of them were actually aiming in the right general direction, while others of course were not), but none had even the faintest hope of hitting the mark directly. A student of Christian theology at the time, this knowledge rocked my world.
And then there was for me the physical dimension of Gnosis.
Like the rest of the experience of Gnosis, the physical dimension of it came upon me suddenly and very unexpectedly when I was 18. I was away at college at the time, I was meditating, and — suddenly and unexpectedly — I was feeling something in my hands that is normally reserved only for the domain of sight: I was feeling a sensation of light. My eyes themselves saw nothing, but if the visual perception of light were to be translated into the realm of touch, that sensation would come as close as I can describe to what I experienced.
The sensation was powerful, unmistakably real, and — emphatically — nothing that I could ignore.
At first, I worried secretly that I was losing my grip, that I had suddenly gone a bit bonkers. So I eventually found my courage, and confided the experience to one of my professors, a psychologist who was also a Roman Catholic priest (remember, I was a theology major at the time), and I asked him directly if he thought this sounded at all like schizophrenia. His answer was no (fortunately!), since I exhibited no other indication of the condition. But he also said he really didn’t know what it might be; he said that if he still believed in genuine mystical experience, that this is what he would call what he’d heard me describing to him.
Then he advised me to keep quiet about it. And so I did, for the greater part — and for many years.
Many years later now, the feeling has neither vanished nor has it subsided; in fact, it has only increased. Eventually I would come to feel this Luminous Intelligence not only in my hands but emerging from within and encompassing my entire body. It seemed to have a sense of presence attached to it, and a conscious Intelligence, as I’ve just alluded to.
In the years since, this creative Intelligence has totally revolutionized my life — from top to bottom.
I must say that I would not trade this gift for anything in the world — absolutely nothing — but I must also say that the inner revolutions that have resulted from courting this Creative Intelligence have not been without considerable earthly costs, either. (When I eventually came across The Gospel According to Thomas, I resonated with it — especially some of the words in its beginning: “Let the seeker not stop seeking until he finds. And when he finds, he will be troubled.” In my case, I would be troubled — and for quite some time to come.)
Although I went on to earn my theology degrees, I am no longer outwardly religious. To me, Gnosis is much deeper and more profound than any religious truth — even words themselves fail in the face of it.
